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Tamil is a
classical language and one of
the major
languages of the
Dravidian language family. It
has smaller communities of speakers in many other countries. As
of 1996, it was the eighteenth most spoken language, with over
74 million speakers worldwide.
Tamil is one of the few living classical languages and has an
unbroken literary
tradition of over two
millennia. The written language
has changed little during this period, with the result that
classical
literature is as much a part of
everyday Tamil as modern literature. Tamil school-children, for
example, are still taught the alphabet using the átticúdi,
an
alphabet rhyme written around
the
first
century A.D.
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